to his words, but she couldn’t be positive.
“Tom, let’s hold it a little longer. We need good pictures for the feed and up higher it’s just blurs and lights. People need to
see
the damned place.”
“Nik, I agree with Tom. If we crash into KPOP we’ll be the lead on someone else’s live feed. You’d hate that.” That was Larry, older of the two camera jocks. He knew how fragile and precious life was, even if the concept hadn’t yet dawned on Nikki.
But she would hate to lead anybody else’s feed: she was ferociously competitive, so much so that it scared many people. In the station, she was called “Mary Tyler Moore from Hell.”
She looked out the window and saw a fleet, a mob, a density of news choppers hovering about her same altitude over America, the country, and America, the Mall. It was a tricky thing; the birds had to avoid updrafts and couldn’t predict blasts of prairie wind, so they tried to keep a good three hundred feet apart, but nearly everyone wanted the money shot, which was the state police communications trailer a few hundred yards east of the mall, itself surrounded by police and other official vehicles, in the same shot with the south entrance of the mall, with its famous AtM sign, plastered four stories tall, that wasbased on a cartoony simplification of the mall’s Americanized shape.
“Just a few seconds more, guys,” she commanded. “Marty. Are you getting good pix?”
“The best, Nik, but don’t get yourself killed yet. If we need you to die for ratings, we’ll let you know.”
“Ha ha,” she said humorlessly. “Okay, let’s get out of here—”
“Something’s coming through,” said Cap’n Tom, and he plugged the emergency general aviation channel into the radio system.
“This is State Police HQ, I am asking all news helicopters to rise to and not wander below three thousand feet. We have incoming to the mall and I need you people out of the way so you don’t get hurt.”
“Hey, maybe something’s finally going to happen,” Jim, the younger, the more eager cameraman, said.
“We won’t be able to see jack from three,” said Nikki. “Larry, what lens are you using? Can you go to something zoomier?”
“You really lose a lot of resolution,” Larry said. “It’ll look like plastic toys in split-pea soup. But no one else will have much anyway.”
“Damn,” she said. “Okay, let’s do it.”
She felt the bottomless-pit sensation as Cap’n Tom elevated the craft against the pull of gravity and the structure beneath got smaller. From altitude, the mall stood in gigantic isolation, a wounded America whose sundered arteries spurted illuminated blood into the purple haze of the lowering sun.
It felt so strange, this proximity thing of the media. There they were, safe and toasty at 3,000 feet above the place, and inside, terrible dramas of life and death were being played out. Nikki and her cohort were there to witness and report, yet it was real life and real death at stake, nothing neat or melodramatic about it. And of course they knew that if they did well—what was the line from some old movie? “I think it’s safe to say you men are in for some promotions, medals, and positive recommendations in your personnel files!”
Then she saw it.
The cavalry? Not quite.
“Is that all?” Jim asked.
“Clearly, that’s not an assault,” said Nikki.
It was just the state police Bell JetRanger, rising from a parking lot and veering on the tilt toward the mall, all lights running hot and red and blinking.
“What are they going to do, scare the bad guys with the noise?” Larry said.
The bird, painted in the maroon-brown scheme of the Minnesota State Police, took a direct line to the mall and hovered six feet off its roof. Six young men in dark suits jumped out and began to deploy at the edges of the lake-shaped glass skylights that topped the atrium over the center of the mall.
“Six guys?” said Jim.
“Those aren’t guys,” said Nikki.
“Tom, let’s hold it a little longer. We need good pictures for the feed and up higher it’s just blurs and lights. People need to
see
the damned place.”
“Nik, I agree with Tom. If we crash into KPOP we’ll be the lead on someone else’s live feed. You’d hate that.” That was Larry, older of the two camera jocks. He knew how fragile and precious life was, even if the concept hadn’t yet dawned on Nikki.
But she would hate to lead anybody else’s feed: she was ferociously competitive, so much so that it scared many people. In the station, she was called “Mary Tyler Moore from Hell.”
She looked out the window and saw a fleet, a mob, a density of news choppers hovering about her same altitude over America, the country, and America, the Mall. It was a tricky thing; the birds had to avoid updrafts and couldn’t predict blasts of prairie wind, so they tried to keep a good three hundred feet apart, but nearly everyone wanted the money shot, which was the state police communications trailer a few hundred yards east of the mall, itself surrounded by police and other official vehicles, in the same shot with the south entrance of the mall, with its famous AtM sign, plastered four stories tall, that wasbased on a cartoony simplification of the mall’s Americanized shape.
“Just a few seconds more, guys,” she commanded. “Marty. Are you getting good pix?”
“The best, Nik, but don’t get yourself killed yet. If we need you to die for ratings, we’ll let you know.”
“Ha ha,” she said humorlessly. “Okay, let’s get out of here—”
“Something’s coming through,” said Cap’n Tom, and he plugged the emergency general aviation channel into the radio system.
“This is State Police HQ, I am asking all news helicopters to rise to and not wander below three thousand feet. We have incoming to the mall and I need you people out of the way so you don’t get hurt.”
“Hey, maybe something’s finally going to happen,” Jim, the younger, the more eager cameraman, said.
“We won’t be able to see jack from three,” said Nikki. “Larry, what lens are you using? Can you go to something zoomier?”
“You really lose a lot of resolution,” Larry said. “It’ll look like plastic toys in split-pea soup. But no one else will have much anyway.”
“Damn,” she said. “Okay, let’s do it.”
She felt the bottomless-pit sensation as Cap’n Tom elevated the craft against the pull of gravity and the structure beneath got smaller. From altitude, the mall stood in gigantic isolation, a wounded America whose sundered arteries spurted illuminated blood into the purple haze of the lowering sun.
It felt so strange, this proximity thing of the media. There they were, safe and toasty at 3,000 feet above the place, and inside, terrible dramas of life and death were being played out. Nikki and her cohort were there to witness and report, yet it was real life and real death at stake, nothing neat or melodramatic about it. And of course they knew that if they did well—what was the line from some old movie? “I think it’s safe to say you men are in for some promotions, medals, and positive recommendations in your personnel files!”
Then she saw it.
The cavalry? Not quite.
“Is that all?” Jim asked.
“Clearly, that’s not an assault,” said Nikki.
It was just the state police Bell JetRanger, rising from a parking lot and veering on the tilt toward the mall, all lights running hot and red and blinking.
“What are they going to do, scare the bad guys with the noise?” Larry said.
The bird, painted in the maroon-brown scheme of the Minnesota State Police, took a direct line to the mall and hovered six feet off its roof. Six young men in dark suits jumped out and began to deploy at the edges of the lake-shaped glass skylights that topped the atrium over the center of the mall.
“Six guys?” said Jim.
“Those aren’t guys,” said Nikki.
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